Intimacy is a function of acceptance. Recently my friend's, who lives in the US, grandfather, who lived in India, passed away. She is very sad since she did not have a chance to be with him in his final moments or to be part of the last services. She is sad because she was very close to her grandfather and now misses him even more knowing that even if she were to go back to India, she will not find him there anymore.
What makes a relationship so special that we long to be with the companion in the absence of their company? To understand the answer to this question we need to understand what sometimes makes it difficult to be together.
Think back of a time when you were in a difficult relationship - be it for a few minutes or for several years. A difficult relationship is such because of disagreement between the related. Not to say that agreement is the sole basis of a relationship, but failing to resolve disagreements or lack of inclination to acknowledge and accept differences and disagreements sure does lead to the death of a relationship's liveliness, even if the partners may choose to continue to be together. Being together is not the same as experiencing togetherness. There often hides great loneliness in a crowd.
The time when we feel most alive in a relationship is when we can be who we are - a 'who we are' that changes from time to time - now happy, now sad, now generous, now demanding, now benevolent, now revengeful. And yet, we are the sum total of all these paradoxical and seemingly opposite states of being. Rarely are we able to find - or be - such a person. Relationships are a struggle in dominance, assertion of freedom, desire for control, and an endless effort to chisel away other's 'undesirable' traits.
A being, compelled to conform to a forced image, is reduced to an object. A being, unlike an object, has the need to be free to express, evolve, and to be howsoever his or her life chooses to flow. That is the state in which the being is most comfortable - when it is free to be. To be whosoever and howsoever without the fear of rejection or the fear of being judged. It is only in the security of such a relationship that a being flowers.
Partners seek predictability as a means to security. However, nature of life is to be neither predictable nor to be secure. Nature of being is to be free and to flow in the direction of that expression.
The need to be free then seeks a relationship that allows that to happen. A relationship that accepts the person not for who they are but for what they could become, not for what can be made out of them, but the choice to be ever present, lovingly, to whatever they may choose to make of themselves. Only in total acceptance can there exist the comfort of togetherness, in which lies the absence of fear - the ripe and the only soil which can give birth to the delicate flower of intimacy.
